Here’s an excerpt from a great article from the Baltimore Sun detailing a little about the benefits of weight loss using hot sauce as an adjunct.

If people have enough faith in Dr. Spiro Antoniades to let him operate on their spines, why not trust the guy for weight-loss advice? Two words: hot sauce.

The Hopkins-trained spine surgeon has just written The Hot Sauce Diet: A Journey of Behavior Modification, a self-published book that’s for sale on Amazon and will soon be stocked in the gift shops at Mercy and St. Agnes hospitals, where he operates.

Antoniades tells dieters to douse their food with Tabasco so they eat slowly and drink lots of water. He also advocates taking a straight shot of the stuff when food cravings strike, to more or less unring Pavlov’s bell.

“For serious, inappropriate, uncontrollable hunger, I recommend a full swig of hot sauce straight from the bottle,” he writes. “I know this is drastic, but inappropriate hunger behavior needs to be punished. Once the swig is in your mouth, you should not swallow it immediately but rather swish it around like a wine connoisseur until the burning effect diminishes.”

If that sounds hard to swallow, consider that the physician has healed himself. A year ago, he said, he had 265 pounds on his 5-foot-11 frame. The 40-year-old father of three said he dropped 70 pounds - and is ulcer-free.

Hot sauce gave him the negative reinforcement he said he needed to shake off the gluttony and guilt wrapped up in his Greek-American roots.

“My dad grew up in Athens, during the German occupation,” Antoniades said. “Any time I didn’t finish my food, I had to hear that lecture, how they were hungry during the occupation. … You can’t eat at family houses because they think you’re sick if you don’t just gorge yourself.”

Antoniades said he didn’t even try shopping his book around to publishers. He just wanted to create a guide for colleagues who keep asking how he lost all the weight. He has no plans to become a full-time diet guru.

“I have a day job,” he said.

If hot sauce works for weight loss, we should be able to shed about 100 pounds apiece!

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI